Fever Crumb Part 12

It took him some time to control himself, and stow his emotions away. When he was ready he walked out calmly into the street, meaning to find his way back across the city to where the other Engineers were waiting.

He was almost at the corner of Cripplegate when he realized that he had left the Solent house without his hat. It must still be lying where he had thrown it, in the wrecked hallway. He was just wondering if he should turn back for it when a rough voice shouted, "It's another one of 'em! Grab him, lads!"

Dr. Crumb started to run, but in his panic he ran the wrong way, straight into the hands of the rioters. They grabbed and pinioned him. They lifted him off the ground. They jostled him round a corner and into the midst of a small crowd, and when he looked about he found that he was surrounded by his fellow Engineers, all prisoners, too.

"Crumb!" said Griffin Whyre. "They caught us on our way out of Madame Lakshmi's tower. Perhaps we would have been less conspicuous if we had not all gone en ma.s.se. A most unreasonable woman, Crumb, but what equipment she possesses! 'Radio,' I believe the Ancients would have called it. if that is an example of the Movement's technology, Stayling is right to side with them...."

Dr. Crumb found that he was not remotely interested in Madame Lakshmi or her radio. He was more inclined to wonder why the Order had been seized, and why their grimy captors were shoving them uphill toward the Barbican. "What do they want with us?" he asked.

Whyre shrugged, but one of the roughs walking alongside overheard him and said, "You're needed at the Barbican, mate. Wormtimber's got himself squished, and the Mayor needs somebody who understands the old machines...."

"if Gilpin Wheen needs our help," protested Dr. Crumb, "he could simply have requested it, like a civilized man."

"Who said anyfink about Gilpin Wheen? He's finished. It's Ted Swiney who's running this city now."

Chapter 28 Under New Management.

Ted Swiney hadn't meant to get himself a city that day. Everything was happening faster than he'd planned, thanks to Bagman Creech and the Patchskin girl. But the mob that surrounded G.o.dshawk's Head and went storming up Slaughtergate afterward to loot the fine houses on Ludgate Hill and seize the Barbican, well, they needed a leader to look to, didn't they? "Swiney!" they chanted, as they harried the frightened old councillors out of their homes. "Swiney!" they bellowed, ducking poor Gilpin Wheen in the horse trough outside the Barbican. "Swiney for Mayor!"

(A few tried yelling for Charley Shallow, him being Bagman Creech's heir and all, but Charley looked too young to be a mayor. Anyway, they didn't know his name, and yells of "Bagman's Boy, You Know, the Little Skinny One with the Hat" didn't sound half so good as "Swiney!" when they echoed back at you off the Barbican walls.) So they shouted for Swiney, and when the doors of the Barbican finally gave way and they surged inside it was Swiney whom they carried shoulder high, and Swiney whom they set down upon the ornate plastic and chromium throne of the Lord Mayor of London.

Swiney took it in his stride. He had a few of his trusty lads with him -- Brickie Chapstick and Mutt Gnarly and that crowd from the Mott and Hoople. Prowling around the mayor's apartments, he examined silver ornaments and squinted uncomprehendingly at antique paintings. Someone had fetched up a crate of vintage Frankish wine from the mayoral cellars, and he had a swig of that, but it tasted foreign, so he sent a few lads down to his brewery for a keg of decent London beer. A few more were dispatched to find Engineers -- there was a lot of old-tech junk plonked on pedestals around the place, and he'd need somebody to tell him what it was worth. The rest of the lads he sent out to start quelling the riot. He'd been happy enough to see High London trashed while it belonged to old woofters like Wheen, but now that it was his, he wanted it to come through the night without being burned down. Mutt and Brickie and their mates knocked some heads together, and filled some others with dire visions of what happened to people who got on the wrong side of Ted.

Slowly, like a big, bad-tempered animal settling back to sleep, the brief disturbances wound down. It had been a little riot by London standards, with barely a hundred people killed, and only a half dozen buildings burning, somewhere down Cripplegate, but in its aftermath a carnival feeling filled the city. Happy looters gathered in the big square in front of the Barbican, clad in other people's hats and stolen ball gowns and tattered curtains ripped from the mansions of former councillors. The rain had stopped. In the smoky, slanting sunlight of late afternoon they waited for their new Lord Mayor to make his first proclamation.

Ted Swiney swaggered out onto the mayoral balcony, high above the throng. He'd b.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt up, and tied his mean little bow tie tight around his neck, which made his face redder than ever. "Swiney!" hollered the crowd.

Ted looked down at their upturned faces, smeared all across the square below him like the pattern on a carpet. A dim, rare doubt swam into his mind. How did you run a place like London? He had already sent the former councillors off to douse the fires, so he couldn't ask them. But then his usual confidence returned. He might not know how to run a city, but he knew how to run a pub all right. How different could it be?

He turned and said something to Mutt and Brickie, then looked at the crowd again and raised his fists for quiet. "Right," he bellowed. "First off, this gaff's under new management. You --" (and here he turned to poor, wet Gilpin Wheen, whom Brickie had just hauled out onto the balcony) "-- you're barred! Get out of my town, and don't come back!"

He waited till Wheen had scurried off and the mob's delight had quieted down a bit. "Right," he said, straightening his tie.

Dealing with the old man had given him time to think about his own policies. What would his administration stand for? "Here's some new rules for you," he said. "From now on, no toffs, no misshapes, no foreigners, no spitting. Karaoke every Tuesday night, here at the Barbican. And live sports! Let's get Pickled Eel Circus rebuilt and have some proper fights again!"

A fond memory wafted back to him of the days when he had been the hero of Pickled Eel, using his fists and his wits to bludgeon flat all comers. He ought to get a mural done of himself, he thought, forty feet high in his fighting togs, all up the side of the Barbican. But he wouldn't announce that yet. What he needed was something that would please the crowd.

"And first off," he hollered, "since we've all had a busy day, I 'spect we could all use a beer."

Throughout his speech the crowd had heard a rumbling, low and hollow, growing louder. Now, down Cattermole Street and around the prow of the Barbican there came trundling an enormous barrel, rolled up the cobbled hill from Swiney's brewery in St Kylie by Mutt Gnarly and a regiment of eager, boozy helpers. The crowd parted to let them maneuver the huge keg to a spot below Ted's balcony, where they heaved and strained and manhandled it, and finally managed to lift it up on two timber trestles. More men appeared, pulling a dray heaped high with mugs and tankards. Mutt used a lump hammer to drive a tap into the barrel, and drew off a pint of foaming amber beer, which he raised toward Ted while the rest of the crowd cheered.

"Brimstone Best!" yelled Swiney, above the din. "A barrel of my finest, big enough for all. Usually I stick a rusty horseshoe in each keg to give it a bit of bite, but this one's so big I had to use an anvil! So get stuck in. The first pint's free and after that it's half price till dawn. It's happy hour!"

And so it was. It was the happiest hour of Ted Swiney's entire reign. He leaned on the balcony and watched his followers get drunk, and the same half-contented, half-contemptuous look came over his face that he wore when he was standing behind his own bar. "Stupid cloots," he muttered to himself. "Booze and circuses, that'll keep 'em quiet." This mayoring lark was going to be a doddle.

But then, above the gusts of raucous singing that wafted from the square, he heard a new sound, softer and yet more menacing than the shouts of the drunken 'prentices fighting and spewing in the streets below.

A rumble and a roar it was, like beer kegs trundling into some vast cellar far away. Ted had never heard that sound before, but he knew it meant trouble. "What's that?" he asked Brickie Chapstick, but Brickie, too full of Brimstone Best, just said, "You're my best mate, you are," and fell over on the carpet.

Ted went and found a window and looked out of it. Northward, where the dim line of the Moatway stretched across the hazy heath, big lazy clouds of smoke were starting to sprawl across the land, and pulses of light kept flapping and flickering inside them, red and gold and white.

Even the revellers in the square had noticed it by then. "Shurrup," they told one another. "No, wha'sh'at, shurrup, listen ..."

The sound came only dimly to them even then. Crackling volleys of musketry, the whoop of unlikely old-energy weapons, and the deep, steady, kettledrum boom of nomad cannon.

Chapter 29 The Traction Castle.

The mono was an inefficient, fuel-hungry mode of transport, but it was fast. Fever looked out of the windows as it went rolling past the wrecked balloon and curved toward the breach that the Movement had made in the Moatway. As it climbed the steep bank she saw Stalkers at work there, pulling down the shattered palisades and heaping up the bodies of dead London soldiers. One of the Movement's armored land barges was perched amid the ruins of a fort on the crest of the embankment, and she pressed her face close to the gla.s.s as the mono rolled past it, trying to peer between its armor plates to see which sort of engine it used, and whether it had wheels or tracks. Hatches on its hull were open and men in steel helmets and s.h.i.+ning chain-mail vests were sitting on its upperworks.

Before she could make out much more, the mono was careering down the steep northern face of the Moatway, crossing the nettle-filled dike in front of it by means of a makes.h.i.+ft timber bridge. She could see other, smaller vehicles on the land ahead, and behind them something so high, and dirty, and pale that she thought it might be the snout of a glacier. Could the ice really have come so far south?

And then she looked again at the thing, and slowly it rearranged itself in her mind until she understood what it was.

It was a traction fortress, the great capital vehicle of the Movement, armored in timber and metal, painted in dirty, whitish dazzle-patterns which must have served as camouflage while it was lumbering across the Ice Wastes. Watchtowers and gun emplacements encrusted its hull, their hard edges softened by swags of camouflage netting. Huge, studded, barrel-shaped wheels showed dimly through the mist that hung about its skirts, the mist which was not mist at all but vapor from its hundreds of chimneys and exhaust stacks.

"It must be a hundred feet tall!" breathed Fever, peering up at its high prow, where a carved wooden dragon's head reared up, irrational, brutal, and stained red by the evening sun.

The Stalkers, of course, did not reply.

In the fortress's flank an armored gate stood open, and the mono rolled through it, up a ramp and into a hangar where a dozen others like it stood waiting or were being refueled by crews of mechanics. Many of the machines had names, like Rolling Thunder or The Wheel Thing , but before Fever had time to take in any more details Lammergeier and Corvus were ordering her out of their mono. They marshalled her through a bulkhead door and up a spiral staircase, through more doors, along a pa.s.sageway. The wooden walls, and the low wooden ceilings, were all carved with serpentine patterns and the stylized forms of the G.o.ds and heroes of the old north. Fever and the Stalkers crossed a chamber where a huge cannon and its crew stood ready at an open gun port, and pa.s.sed into another, more richly decorated, where evening light came through a score of slit-shaped windows to stripe the hanging tapestries and polished deck.

A man who had been sitting in a big chair there rose as she entered. There were others in the room with him -- armored warriors with swords and guns hanging from their thick belts, women in fur-trimmed robes -- but Fever knew at once that the man in the chair was the important one, and she paid no attention to the rest.

" the balloon has been secured ," said the Stalker Lammergeier. "one of its occupants is dead, but this girl continues to function."

The man walked all round Fever with his hands folded behind his back, looking at her as if she were an exhibit.

"I am the Land Admiral Nikola Quercus," he said. He had the faintest trace of an accent. His eyes were narrow, slanted, and stone gray. He wore a shabby, tall-collared tunic, breeches, and boots. He didn't look like a warrior. He looked like a scholar. A mild young man, not big or tall, with fair hair cropped short and brushed forward around his high forehead.

"I am glad to see you safe, Miss Crumb," he said.

Fever could not hide the surprise she felt, that he should know her name. Quercus laughed softly. "Don't worry, I'm not a sorcerer. My agents have been in touch with Dr. Stayling, and keep me informed by means of technomancy. It was a bold move of the Engineer's, putting you aboard that flying machine. Luckily he was able to warn us that you were coming. I am sorry about your companion, Master Salent."

"Solent," said Fever. "He died saving me. He was very brave."

Quercus nodded. "His soul is in the High Halls, then."

Fever thought she should tell him that there were no such things as souls, then decided that she had better not.

"He will be treated with honor," Quercus promised.

"He's dead."

"Nevertheless, we have certain rites and rituals with which we honor the bodies of the courageous dead, here in the Movement."

Fever bit her lip and supposed she should feel grateful. Funeral rites were silly religious nonsense, and it seemed pitiable that a man like Quercus should believe in G.o.ds and souls and rituals. But Kit Solent had not been an Engineer. She remembered the candles under Katie's portrait in his drawing room, and thought that perhaps it would have comforted him to know that the Movement would treat his remains with ceremony.

Quercus nodded, dismissing the matter. He held out his arm to Fever. "Come. I must take you to meet the Snow Leopard."

"Who?"

"My chief technomancer. We call her the Snow Leopard. You know her perhaps by a different name, as Wavey G.o.dshawk."

"My mother?" said Fever, suddenly hesitant, afraid. "But that's ..."

She stopped herself. She had been about to say, "That's impossible." But it was not impossible. When Dr. Crumb told her his story she had recognized that there must be a chance Wavey had survived. She had accepted that she might have a mother, somewhere in the world. She just had not expected to have the question resolved so soon. It was one thing to have a theoretical mother, quite another to be asked to meet her.

Quercus's smile grew broader as he watched the expressions flit across her face. "Come. She waits for you."

How long had it been traveling, that fortress of the Movement? Even the Movement had forgotten. Back when they were first driven from their homeland by ice and enemies, it had been the ox-drawn wagon of their chieftain. It had grown as they moved on, acquiring first steam and then petrol engines from the cities that they conquered, putting on turrets and funnels, gun decks and cabins, spires and jaws and sally ports. It was too big now to be powered only by its primitive engines, and its under-decks were filled with ma.s.sive treadmills, worked by regiments of slaves.

But still the Movement recalled how, long ago, they had lived in Arctic oak forests during some brief, lost era of warmth, and wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds and spirits of the trees. They had brought one tree with them on their journeyings -- age-old, long dead -- to remind them of their origins. It stood in a chamber of its own, near the castle's stern, a place which seemed quiet even when the engines were pounding and the big guns boomed. Centuries had pa.s.sed since it last bore leaves or acorns, but the stumps of its branches were decorated with thousands of little sc.r.a.ps of colored rag, the funeral ribbons of everyone who had died during the Movement's wanderings.

Beneath the oak that evening sat a woman. She wore one of the simple gowns that Movement women favored, a gray gown that left her throat bare and displayed a curious sepia birthmark beneath her ear and another in the hollow above her collarbone, like a puddle of spilled ink. Nervously her long hands rose to tuck her hair behind her ears. Then she changed her mind and untucked it again. Her hair was gray-white, the color of wood ash. There were faint crows' feet at the corners of her eyes. In every other way she looked just as she had on the day that Gideon Crumb rescued her from the crowd in St Kylie. Years lay lightly on the Scriven.

One of the big oak doors at the chamber's end opened. The girl came in, and Nikola Quercus came in behind her and softly shut the door again.

"Fever Crumb," he said.

Fever and her mother looked at each other.

"Fever," said Wavey G.o.dshawk, after a little while.

She had thought of Fever often during the years since she fled London, but she had always pictured her as a little girl, like the little girl she had once been herself. She had not prepared herself to meet this spindly teenager with her shaven head and her strange, familiar face.

"My child," she said, after a little longer.

"You have grown up!" she said, wondering.

"What have you done to your hair ?" she asked.

Chapter 30 The Snow Leopard.

My mother, thought Fever numbly. She went toward her, but did not take the slender hands that Wavey G.o.dshawk stretched out to her. My mother. She could smell her perfume, a subtle, blue-gray scent that matched her dress. And what a strange face she had! It wasn't just those few small speckles. The cheekbones were too high, the eyes too large, the jaw too long, the wide mouth filled with far too many teeth (though very straight, thanks to the brace she'd worn when Dr. Crumb had met her). It was easy to see why people had believed that the Scriven were a new species. It was easy to see why the Scriven had believed it themselves. She isn't human, Fever kept thinking. And she is my mother....

"You could have sent word," she said. "Dr. Crumb doesn't even know that you are still alive!"

"I thought it better not to," said Wavey G.o.dshawk. "What good could it have done? I could not return to London alone. I had to wait until Quercus was ready. Sit, my dear; sit ...

She patted the bench and Fever sat down beside her. She reached out and touched Fever's face, smoothing a thumb over her lips, brus.h.i.+ng a s.m.u.t from her forehead. Fever flinched away from her touch, feeling an irrational anger build inside her. What right did this stranger have to prod and stroke her, as if she were a pet or a doll?

Wavey G.o.dshawk sensed her feelings. "Oh, Fever," she said, sitting back and folding her hands in her lap, smiling. "Oh, but you must think me a terrible mother! To abandon you. To abandon your father before he even knew that he was a father.... But I had to abandon him. G.o.dshawk was furious when he found out I was in love with Gideon. He sent Gideon away, and he told me that if I tried to contact him he would be killed. He sent me away, too, said he couldn't stand the sight of me, and packed me off to live at the Barbican.

"Then, when he learned that I was going to have a baby, he softened. I think that he had long been wanting me to have a child who would continue the House of G.o.dshawk. He had spent years finding a good husband for me, and when Odo Bolventor rejected me perhaps he was glad that Gideon Crumb had been there to provide him with an heir. But still he would not let me contact Gideon."

Fever could picture her as she had looked in those days. The way she had worn her hair, the clothes she'd favored. She had no memories of Wavey from her own babyhood, of course, but there were other memories, scores of them, from earlier times. Wavey as a little girl, and as a young woman. Wavey in her white coat, her hair tied back, careful and serious and the best laboratory a.s.sistant a man could ask for. Wavey fastening those thick leather wristbands, frowning as she tightened the screws of the helmet around Fever's head...

No , not my head! Not my wrists! These aren't my memories....

Wavey kept on smiling at her, and reached out impulsively to touch her hand. "You were never comfortable in my womb, Fever, dear. There was some mismatch between your human and your Scriven halves. How you struggled and squiggled! Elbows and heels jabbed me. I was feverish always. You arrived early, one spring night in my apartment at the Barbican, long before you were looked for. A small little purple monkey you looked, barely longer than my hand, and the Scrivener hadn't made even one single mark upon you. n.o.body dreamed that you would live. But G.o.dshawk took you away with him to his laboratories at Nonesuch House, and although I was too weak to go and see you there, he sent word to me by a servant every day.

"Every day I woke up fearing that they would tell me you were dead, but every day they said, 'She's still alive. She's still alive. Your father is doing all he can. Medical machines not seen since Ancient days...'

"And then, in early summer, when the blossom was still on the trees, he brought you home to me. You were in your little basket. Your eyes had changed -- two different colors. He said it was a side effect of the surgery he had performed, and I did not complain. I was just so happy to see you. And so grateful to G.o.dshawk for having saved you.

"But we had so little time together, Fever! There were riots in the city, and the mercenaries whom G.o.dshawk had hired to protect us betrayed us and joined with the rioters instead.

"You and I were still living at the Barbican, and so were other Scriven, friends of G.o.dshawk, sheltering from the riots. One morning he had us all gather in the bas.e.m.e.nt and showed us the secret pa.s.sage to Nonesuch House. We begged him to come with us, but he refused. He said he would stay and seal up the tunnel entrance, then organize a last stand against the Skinners. They can't kill me,' he said, as we set off along the tunnel. 'Just keep that baby safe, daughter!'

"That night, from the windows of Nonesuch House, we heard their horrid cheering drifting across the marshes, as if the whole of London was celebrating, and we knew that G.o.dshawk was dead.

"We stayed there, hidden, for nearly two weeks. At first we felt sure that some Scriven n.o.blemen would have survived the riots, that they'd retake London and come to rescue us. But slowly we realized we were alone.

"There was not much to eat. The others squabbled. Some said I should not keep you, Fever, that it was wrong to let a half-human hybrid eat food real Scriven needed. When they were not arguing and blaming one another and inventing hopeless schemes to win the city back, the men went out and cut the causeway to make sure no looters reached us, though there was enough loot on Ludgate Hill to keep the commons busy for a long time.

"At the end of the second week the Skinners came for us. My companions shot at them from the gardens and thought they'd killed them all -- how they jeered and laughed, flinging stones at the bodies afloat in the lagoon! But one had survived, and that night he came to the house.